Elastifile: Software-Defined, Cross-Cloud Data ‘Fabric’

An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief

Like other Software-Defined Storage vendors, Elastifile implements a single abstraction across multiple, diverse data stores in order to create a global namespace for each of its customers.

Where Elastifile is different: its abstraction is a POSIX-compliant file system, which means that applications can write to files in Elastifile with no modifications. In essence, Elastifile provides a policy-driven ‘X drive’ that appears to be everywhere at once, on premises and in the cloud.

Elastifile assumes flash storage under the covers for active data, and uses several sophisticated techniques to maximize performance, including an optimized consensus algorithm for achieving both scale and performance and proprietary techniques for dealing with noisy or otherwise misbehaving nodes.

Elastifile also offers a check-in/check-out mechanism similar to Git that stores and deduplicates the deltas (changes from previous versions of each file), thus optimizing use of storage, addressing data gravity issues, and further improving performance.

In fact, Elastifile is fast and flexible enough to provide a policy-driven persistence tier for containers – a challenge even cloud-native storage and database solutions struggle to surmount.